The Portland Town Council voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a tiny addition to the city’s tax on stays at accommodations and holiday vacation rentals in an hard work to assist the lodging field recover from the coronavirus pandemic and to rehabilitate Portland’s image.
A 3% tax — up from 2% — will be levied on hotel and vacation rental stays developing right after June 30 to fund Portland’s Tourism Enhancement District, which is managed by Vacation Portland and supports advertising and marketing campaigns to boost the city’s lodging and conference industries. With the further tax, attendees remaining in Portland could be assessed a whole of 16% in taxes on lodge stays by several neighborhood and condition lodging taxes.
The Town Council also voted to make the 2% foundation tax for the Tourism Improvement District long term, but will overview regardless of whether the new 1% tax is however required in 2026 and every single five decades after. Guests keeping in a $150 resort space would spend an additional $1.50 nightly surcharge at the time the new tax goes into outcome.
Journey Portland, a nonprofit that encourages the city’s tourism marketplace, lobbied for the new tax, contending that the dollars would enable the tourism sector get well from the pandemic and reputational harm the city suffered during last summer’s protests.
The team hopes the new tax could crank out $3.1 million in the 1st 12 months, if the tourism business starts to rebound this summertime.
Vacation Portland, which cut its personnel by 40% past April as tourism and lodge profits plummeted, depends on the Tourism Advancement District tax for a lot more than 40% of its price range.
Resort operators are necessary to pay back the tax to the Tourism Advancement District, but normally pass the value on to friends by way of taxes on resort stays.
The tourism field has been just one of the most difficult hit in the course of the pandemic.
Hotel occupancy in Portland plummeted from almost 75% in 2019 to 34% in 2020. A lot more than 160,000 team room evenings have been cancelled past yr in Portland as substantial situations and conventions ended up banned because of to the pandemic, in accordance to info from Vacation Portland.
Since the begin of the pandemic, Oregon’s leisure and hospitality marketplace has drop 37% of its jobs, in accordance to the Bureau of Labor Data.
But the pandemic could not be the only problem dealing with Portland’s tourism marketplace as it attempts to get better.
Portland drew nationwide media focus past summer months as demonstrators and community and federal law enforcement officers clashed in nightly protests downtown, providing the metropolis a standing for upheaval.
In an Oct. 1 survey of 1,250 persons nationwide performed by consumer analysis organization Motor Insights, 69% of respondents mentioned they experienced usually seen Portland mentioned negatively in the media and 37% explained they deemed the town an unappealing holiday location.
Jeff Miller, president and CEO of Travel Portland, informed the City Council last week that the new tax would be instrumental in kickstarting the tourism industry’s restoration from the pandemic and aiding to repair that reputational harm.
Miller reported the Tourism Advancement District has played a vital part in spurring Portland’s tourism business by way of its internet marketing and outreach considering that it was proven in 2012. Travel Portland estimates that out-of-city guests expended $5.6 billion at neighborhood firms in 2019, up from $3.9 billion in 2011.
But Bakulesh Patel, president and CEO of Wilsonville-centered BHG Motels, explained to the Town Council he was worried that there was no official course of action to receive input from hotel operators across the metropolis about the new tax and reported he felt the cash experienced historically benefited downtown Portland above hotels in other pieces of the town.
“We believe that there is not ample transparency on how this fund is used,” Patel said. “There requires to be more transparency.”
The Metropolis Council asked for Wednesday that Travel Portland present an update in 6 months on exactly where the resources from the new tax are going and how the dollars is encouraging minority-owned hotels and people exterior of downtown.
Portland has a powerful incentive to see its tourism industry get well immediately.
Five p.c of the over-all transient lodging taxes assessed on hotel and vacation rentals go to the Metropolis of Portland’s standard fund. The metropolis gained $30.8 million in typical fund dollars from lodge area taxes in the 2019-20 fiscal calendar year, but expects all those revenues to be down 75% this fiscal yr.
“It’s important to all of us in this group that travel and tourism and hospitality does recover as rapidly and safely and securely as feasible,” explained Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler.